


Looking. Finding. Tethered.

by LLitchi



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: First Time, Found Family, M/M, casefic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-05
Updated: 2013-07-05
Packaged: 2017-12-17 18:44:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/870791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LLitchi/pseuds/LLitchi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The FBI finds a couple in their twenties sat down for Thanksgiving dinner inside an industrial size freezer.</p>
<p>In which one person looks for their family and another finds his.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Looking. Finding. Tethered.

**Author's Note:**

> Uh, ~~two~~ ~~three~~ four caveats: non-canon compliant because I mainlined some episodes yesterday but haven’t finished watching all of them because I’m weak; spoiler up to episode 10; believe not a word of the amateur psychology in this fic, some is actually from a textbook and some is bullshit I made up on the spot; and true to form it’s mostly dialogue and I suck at dialogues, so.

“It’ll warm you up,” Hannibal hands Will a glass of something with dizzying colors, and settles down next to him, an arm coming around him to wrap his shoulders.

It’s unorthodox for them to be certain, but Will is still shaking uncontrollably from the cold that seems seeped into his marrow.

“It’s…it’s psychological, not physical,” he manages through clacking teeth, “but thanks.”

“It’s from the case, your new case with Jack Crawford,” Hannibal says ‘Jack Crawford’ with the chilling deliberation he typically reserves for ‘vegetarian.’ Will thought Hannibal and Jack were friends.

Will nods, even if Hannibal wasn’t really asking, tips his head back barely far enough for a sip. The wine burns on its way down.

“It was in an industrial size freezer,” Will says eventually, “it had to be. She had to prolong rigor mortis.”

_Her mother is screaming silently behind the duct tape, her eyes wide and wet with tears, her body taut with the effort to somehow break, superman style, the rope squeezing, digging into her wrists and ankles. She’s smiling at her mother, but it’s not having the effect she intended._

_She goes back to working on her father. Her father’s hair mustn’t be coiled perfect or brushed finely, but mussed carelessly, and getting him to smile wide instead of the usual benign with no upward inflection to the set of jaws that she’s familiar with will be a challenge. She accomplishes it, and even though it looks like reluctant laughter rather than unabashed happiness, it’ll do._

_Her family is the raucous type, her parents competing to dote and to reprimand in turns._

_She shivers. It’s really cold, she hadn’t expected that too be a problem, but her hands have a slight tremble to them now.She should have worn the thicker gloves. She likes to feel his way around as she arranges them, though._

_She goes for the brush._

“Did she pose them, the couple?” Hannibal asks contemplatively, his left arm a heavy anchor still on Will’s biceps, not making soothing circles like others would because perhaps he knows Will better than everyone else combined now.

Maybe that’s why he’s here. Maybe that’s why when he loses time he finds himself knocking on the door of Hannibal’s practice, but instead of the fact being scary Will finds it reassuring that his subconscious takes him somewhere safe, where he’s welcome and sought and doesn’t have to hide a thing. Even the stag. Even the hours he can’t account for. Even how he feels about Abigail.

Will closes his eyes, tracing his steps on the scene, but he knows that it’s eight thirty-two, that he’s in Hannibal’s Baltimore office, and that he’s Will Graham, “They’re already slumped over the table when we found them, but there was still cosmetics on their faces, the professional kind undertakers use, and there were signs of furniture being moved around. She posed them and set up the scene and took a picture.”

“A domestic scene presumably?”

“Yeah,” Will starts shaking again, this time Hannibal squeezes him close and Will lets his head fall on Hannibal’s shoulder. Animal comfort. “She removed one, but there were three seats around the table. One for the father, one for the mother, and one for herself. She was attention starved, wanted to be an only child.”

“The couple were in their early twenties,” Hannibal traces his hand over the picture Will brought, ignoring the way Will’s rocking himself back and forth, “still stuck in her childhood fantasy, it seems. Is the FBI currently looking for an orphaned undertaker?”

“She wasn’t orphaned,” Will says with complete certainty, “she believes she was a changeling, imagined inside her head for a thousand times what her real family must be like. Recreated them herself. Probably looking for a suitable couple every day. Probably stayed inside the freezer until even the prolonged rigor mortis wore off.”

“Ah,” Hannibal sniffs him, not that surreptitiously, not anymore, and smoothes his hand over Will’s coats, a layer of polyester and a layer of wool and it’s still so, so cold, “that explains the gender pronoun.”

“More media with lost princesses,” Will tugs two fingers under Hannibal’s waistcoat, shamelessly seeking more warmth, “more girls affected by it.”

For a horrible moment he can’t recall any memory of his parents.

He sets the glass down and reaches for the leather bound notebook himself, his other hand groping desperately for something to write with until Hannibal takes pity and grabs his hand, curls Will’s fingers around a pencil.

It’s eight forty-eight, he’s in Baltimore, and his name is Will Graham.

“Don’t,” Hannibal gets up, squeezing the back of his neck where it meets his shoulder for a too quick second and Will finds himself chasing the phantom pressure, “don’t do that to yourself.”

“What would happen to us if we tried _constructing_ a family,” Will whispers, “what would that do to Abigail?”

“It’s not the same thing at all,” Hannibal says tersely, but his features are nearly as vulnerable as the time he was attacked right in his office, and looked up at Will and said that he was worried for _him_ , “it’s not the same thing at all and you know it.”

“Isn’t it,” Will says, “you’re still hoping that when Abigail realizes what we’re doing we’ve already become a family.”

Hannibal doesn’t say that Abigail knows, how could she not, don’t underestimate her intelligence, and Will doesn’t say that they never asked, never confirmed it to her when she asked, tried to pass it off as a joke and she was only asking to hurt them anyway.

Will says, “Biological children are statistically closer to their parents than adopted children are, because biological families are more compatible,” instead.

***

“So we’re looking for one of our colleagues,” Beverly slips on her lab coat, a stubborn greenish stain on its sleeve. Beverly is always trying to lighten up the situation around Will and keep Zeller and Price on track because she’s also one of those people who empathizes, effortless, but unlike him she knows what to do with it. Will harbors an ugly envy of her because of that, because empathy, just enough of it, doesn’t cripple her.

Still, there’s a reason she chooses to work with dead bodies.

Jack caresses his non-existent bears, it’s a leftover habit from when he was still mourning Miriam Lass, “We have someone with family problems, that’s half of the population, someone with a penchant for photography, that’s also half of the population, and probably the same half, and we have a gender and a profession. That’s not enough.”

Beverly narrows her eyes dangerously when Jack directs all of that at Will, “The forensics lab also has trace amounts of the cosmetics that we can track back to the manufacturer. What are we chopped liver?” She crosses her arms, “Don’t answer that,” she adds hastily, “or make a Chesapeake Ripper pun.”

“We still need more,” Jack doesn’t look away from Will, “Is the changeling going to kill again, Will?”

“Yeah,” Will says, “it’s just going to get easier for her,” Jack already knows this, naturally. He just wanted to impress on everybody present the urgency of the situation.

“Is she adopted,” Jack asks.

“I don’t know, but she was probably abused.” Will crunches his eyelids shut. The woman they’re looking for has a too idealized image of family. There was the impression of large silverware on the table, he thinks it was the Thanksgiving turkey; Mr. Alsbury had on a soft sweater; Mrs. Alsbury had a neat bun on her head, and they looked eerily happy with the bullet wounds professionally cleaned and camouflaged.

Real families are complicated with enough internal politics to confound the White House and they’re miserable, utterly miserable at Thanksgiving.

***

“Abuse is the link,” Hannibal doesn’t look up from where he’s doing something gloriously violent to a liver, “it’s how her changeling obsession translates to violence.”

Will likes Hannibal’s office, bathed in the gentle light that some interior designer spent days rolling around clutching his knees trying to achieve, likes the open space, just the perfect middle ground between cozy but non-claustrophobic. Likes that he doesn’t lose time here, with Hannibal, because Hannibal, not Alana, has long been Will’s lighthouse of every port.

Will drums his fingers on the tabletop, “Right.”

“Maybe she killed her own parents too,” Hannibal drizzles olive oil into a pan, “theirs would be brutal murders, not the same modus operandi.’

Will considers this, “Out of hate, not out of love, or is that the same thing? Either way I should definitely tell Jack.”

“Science doesn’t know,” there’s also garlic in tonight’s main course now, and Will decides he likes this too, the hiss the garlic makes grounding him to reality, “Fear and excitement, hate and love, the same physiological reactions.”

“She has one of those instant picture cameras, I should also tell Jack that,” Will migrates to the couch, wanting to sit down when he thinks—he has dropped to the ground where he stood when he was reconstructing the murder for too many times to count, “she frames the photos and then takes even more photos with the frames, so that the scene looks even more like a real family. That’s her trophy.”

Will sees the bright photographs with warm colors she must have taken, even the skin wouldn’t be sallow with her skills as an undertaker. She has all the props she needs now, the tacky souvenirs lining the shelves, the mismatched china, the prescription glasses, but maybe for each different couple, for each set of murders, there would be a little personalization.

Hannibal is quiet for a while, lets the boiling soup be the only sound in the room. Then he turns off the stoves, stalks toward Will.

“Can you think more clearly here, Will?”

“Yes,” Will says, throwing one arm over his eyes.

“Good, because I have some questions,” Hannibal nudges his legs left to sit at his feet, “Why a changeling and not an orphan?”

_Here’s mother, she cooked the turkey and she poured gravy into my mashed potatoes for me, and here’s father, he read the newspaper until mother hollered for him to come to dinner, and shouldn’t he have helped out, the lazy bastard, and he smiled sheepishly and laid the table._

_Father asks about school. He’s proud of his little girl._

“Will,

“William,”

Will doesn’t snap out right away, drifts to the surface like a boat jerking away from its current.

“It’s…she casts them in too clear roles,” Will wheezes, “orphans are more familiar with unconventional families. One mother, a dozen kids. Sometimes without any parental figures.”

“Humans automatically categorizes,” Hannibal says sadly, as if he’s not talking about himself when he says ‘human’, “it’s convenient, it’s how they make hundreds, thousands of decisions every day.  Mothers cook and bathe you and nurse you to health when you’re sick, and fathers teach you how to ride your bike. I wonder, Will, does Alana Bloom confuse you because you don’t know whether to categorize her as a love interest or a friend?”

“Yes,” Will says, he doesn’t lie to Hannibal, “for a while.”

“What about us?” Hannibal slides his palm over Will’s, “are we therapist and patient? Friends? Family? What conventional category do we fit in, Will?”

“You asked me this once,” Will says, letting his eyes go unfocused; it is really nice, Hannibal’s hand. Sometimes surrounded by his pack, wet dog noses and soft snores on all sides, he’s still not warm enough, not enveloped enough, but the single point of contact has him anchored to earth, “the answer is still yes.”

“Because Dr. Bloom is female, you latched on to her as a romantic partner, possibly as family, possibly as your stability.”

“Was I looking in the wrong place,” Will turns over his hand and laces their fingers together.

Hannibal lifts Will’s legs up easily and deposits them into his lap, scooting up the couch and closer, closer to him. It doesn’t faze Will. Hannibal feels more solid. It feels right.

“Do you already know? Because of what we are, because of what we did, were you afraid of becoming family with me, with us?”

Will shudders, “You know I am.”

Hannibal leans down and kisses him. It’s closed mouth but not chaste, not when it’s so possessive, expansive, and it jolts him, shocks him to his core, because it’s one of those things he needs but doesn’t know it until he has it. It’s like the buzzing at the back of his head has ceased, the buzzing that he never realized was there, and he hasn’t felt so real, so tangible in years, for all of his life even, because he feels every touch, every nerve on his skin, the fabric in his hand that’s Hannibal’s shirt.

It’s like waking up from a long dream, like for once all of his senses are alive, online, his sight pulled into sharp focus, Technicolor blooming into his vision.

“What was that,” he chokes when Hannibal draws away, but only a fraction of an inch.

Hannibal doesn’t look smug—Will looking lost and dumbfounded and startled is a daily occurrence—his expression is full of wonder, a little bit rueful, “I attempted to make our family more conventional, so as to alleviate the cognitive dissonance.”

“Oh,” says Will.

Hannibal cups his face, traces the line of his beard with his thumb, “Did it work?”

“But did you want—“ Will says.

Hannibal dips down to catch Will’s upper lip with his mouth, licking a wet trail when Will’s falls open in surprise, “Yes.”

“Yes,” Will says.

***

Hannibal’s couch was soft and comfy. His bed is a heaven of Egyptian threads that run like water through Will’s fingertips and mold themselves around his body.

He sees the antlers, sometimes the stag out of the corners of his eyes but only barely just, a prickling, invasive fear, not all consuming, and every time they creep into his vision Hannibal shushes away his whimpers, pets his hair, chases the nightmares out the door of his office.

There’s a series of noise from other parts of the house, but Hannibal seems unperturbed, makes no move to pull away his hand which by now must be hopelessly tangled in Will’s hair, so Will pays it no mind either, just turns his face into Hannibal’s thighs where he’s pillowing on. It wasn’t his idea. Hannibal literally dragged Will onto his laps when they settled on the bed.

Lulled by the rhythm of Hannibal’s fingers, he drifts to sleep.

When he opens his eyes again, short minutes later, it’s to Abigail’s bemused “Hey.”

Will freezes for the longest second in the world, which is all it takes for Abigail to roll her eyes like a defiant teenager she never had the chance to be. She’s shrugging out of her coat when Will manages, “Hi,” and it’s another second when his brain catches up, “what’re you doing here.”

“I gave her a set of keys,” Hannibal is patting the bed, a tiny stretch of space between them, for some reason, “it seems only practical since she sneaks out the center once a week to come see me.”

Will watches in incredulity as she takes off her boots, sets them carefully in the corner of the room, crawls, wordless, onto the bed and burrows herself in between he and Hannibal, her head wiggling in the crevice between his chest and Hannibal’s leg, her arms pulling and clutching at the sheets, her legs curled into herself. It occurs to him that she’s entirely too small, and she’s still trying to make her presence smaller, a memento from the hunting days with Garrett Jacob Hobbs, but there’s no way for her to do that, not anymore.

“Will,” she whispers, “I killed Nick Boyle.”

Will sighs internally as that fails to inspire any judgment whatsoever, “I know.”

“You attract killers,” she says, “Stammetz, me, Hannibal even. Serial killers. Why is that?”

“I understand them,” Will stares at the back of her head, runs his fingers down her ear, her cheek, until she shifts and looks at him, her eyes searching and interrogative, not enough to be suspicious but uncertain, nonetheless, “I understand what they must go through, what you’re going through, and it is an incredibly powerful thing to be _known_.”

“What about Hannibal,” she asks, hushed, “what does he want? What does he want from you? What does he want from me?”

Will prepares to think, but it’s so obvious.

“What Hannibal does isn’t always in our best interest,” Hannibal’s hand stills, and Will feels this thighs tense, “He’s tethering us to him, that’s all.”

The strokes continue, “So I am,” Hannibal says, a smug smile in his voice.

(Later, when Abigail’s breathing had gone sleepy soft, Will lifts his arm, and then lowers it tentatively, nervously around her. He’s tense and jerky and not daring to rest the entire weight of it on her stomach until she gasps, her breathes hitching, her chest shaking from a nightmare. He hugs her closer, firm and trembling, defiant, because he knows how that is, and because when they're already so intrinsically tied to Hannibal, he wants to be tethered to her, to tether her to him, perhaps, too.)

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback is love.


End file.
